So would he caucus for her on February 1? The 80-year-old former Iowa State fish and wildlife professor, sheepishly dropped his gaze to his shoe tops. His wife, Deanne, who is all in for Hillary, rolled her eyes. “Actually, uh, I’m for Bernie,” he said.

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“It’s a funny story,” he continued. “My 19-year-old grandson has come to live with us while he goes to school here. ... And we began talking about it, about economic inequality and all of that. ... I think Hillary is inevitable, and I’ll vote for her later, but my grandson really convinced me to vote for Sanders. So I’m going to carpool him and all his friends to the caucuses. Several carloads of them, I think.”

Over the past nine months, the Clinton team has recited their collective talking-point mantra that she was always expecting a tough fight here, no matter who her primary opponent was, and that she would earn every vote. But privately, they didn’t expect it to be nearly this close—and Clinton herself has scoffed at the idea that Democratic voters would ever really pick “a socialist” over someone so manifestly prepared to be president, according to people in her orbit.

After her humbling third-place finish behind Barack Obama and John Edwards in 2008, Hillary Clinton hit the caucus state this year with an eye on not just victory, but redemption, committing money, time and an immense ground operation in an effort not only to beat Sanders but vanquish the ghosts of ’08.

Instead, she has watched a sickening slow-motion sequel. Bernie Sanders is no Obama, the original anti-Hillary, but he’s pushing her to the edge. With only two weeks to go before the caucuses, Sanders pulled within 2 percentage points in the latest Des Moines Register poll released last week. The problem, according to interviews with two dozen Clinton insiders and Iowa operatives, isn’t with Clinton’s new and improved operation, but with a candidate hampered by her old, familiar limitations.

All the door-knocking, phone-banking, motivated volunteers (there really are hundreds of them) and pizza-fueled pep sessions at Clinton’s downtown Des Moines headquarters can’t alter an immutable fact about the woman at the center of it all: She isn’t an Iowa kind of candidate, never has been, and isn’t going to shape-shift into one by the end of the month. Part of it is Iowa, a state where roughly four in 10 Democrats self-identify as socialists. But the political MRI of the caucus has revealed that Hillary ’16 is essentially the same mixed-bag candidate she’s always been: amply informed but often uninspiring, more focused on the tactical task of fileting her opponent than the strategic imperative of delivering a succinct, appealing message—an establishment fixture in an era of populist statue-smashing.

Hillary Clinton has adapted lessons from her Iowa loss in 2008; she now reads out the names of local volunteers at every rally, a practice Obama enshrined in 2008. At left, volunteers display signs outside a campaign event for Clinton in Toledo, Iowa, this week; right, a volunteer carries a roll of campaign stickers in Waterloo. | AP Photos

“There are certain elements of Hillary Clinton that are just unfixable,” said one Democratic consultant who has worked with her on previous campaigns.

“Since 2008, Clinton’s people have been pretty smart about putting together a really first-rate organization,” says Jeff Link, a Des Moines-based consultant with close ties to former Sen. Tom Harkin, long the state’s dominant Democrat. “In the last eight years she gained all this experience at the State Department, which is great. But experience is not something voters are dying for right now.”

Still, Sanders has his own weaknesses—namely, a late-to-the-game field operation that is struggling mightily to harness his momentum into an effective organization. And it’s Sanders who has the most to lose: He has enough cash to campaign for months, but a Clinton win here could be a coup de grâce, nullifying his probable win in New Hampshire and giving her momentum heading into Nevada and South Carolina where she, not he, has an inherent advantage.

And Clinton remains a formidable front-runner who stands an even-odds chance of winning. Staffers say she is much more personally engaged in the details this time than in 2008, and over the past year has assembled the most formidable field and data-gathering organization on the ground here in all 99 counties—an organizing push overseen by a young operative who ran Obama’s Cedar Rapids operation eight years ago.

Even the selection of her top campaign brass back in Brooklyn reflects her focus on Iowa. Campaign manager Robby Mook has made it clear the bulk of the campaign’s resources, as well as the candidate’s time, would be deployed to the first four states, with a major focus here. In interviews, Mook—a highly skilled field organizer—often begs off questions about a general election strategy and dodges discussion of the big March states with an intense focus instead on the first four states, led by Iowa.

What’s left is a sprint on a flat track pitting Clinton’s army of organizers and data crunchers against Sanders’ free-jazz attempt to convert raw enthusiasm into caucus votes, and in a hurry.

“This isn’t 2008,” said one architect of Barack Obama’s groundbreaking strategy eight years ago. “But if you ask me which I’d take—a great organization or great voter enthusiasm—I’d take voter enthusiasm every single time.”

Momentum, for the moment, seems to be on Sanders’ side. At the Hamburg Inn restaurant in Iowa City (like Ames, another Sanders-friendly college town), a popular pit stop for politicians (Obama and Clinton regularly dropped in eight years ago to nibble on crinkle fries), customers are encouraged to drop a coffee bean in a row of jars labeled for each candidate. One Clinton volunteer who recently stopped by said she was dismayed to see the status of the jars. Hillary Clinton’s sat mostly empty. Sanders had received so many beans they’d had to put out a second jar. It was overflowing, too.

For both Clintons, Iowa isn’t just a state, it’s a taunt. Bill Clinton never competed in the 1992 caucuses, ceding victory to native son Harkin, and he still wishes he’d given Harkin a challenge. A few years back, the hypercompetitive former president approached Harkin to tell him that not being able to run here “was just about the biggest regret in my political life,” according to a Democrat who witnessed the exchange.

For Hillary Clinton, never the type of retail politician her husband was, Iowa “is simply not a great fit,” in the words of one top adviser, speaking a few months ago. In Game Change, the candidate dramatically turned to her husband in the shabby presidential suite of the Hotel Forth Des Moines on that fateful caucus night to pronounce self-pityingly, “Maybe they just don’t like me.”

That wasn’t true. Iowa liked Hillary Clinton just fine—but not nearly as much as they loved Obama or even the as-yet-untainted John Edwards. Clinton spent $30 million in the state and won 70,000 votes, a blockbuster majority in any other year when the average caucus turnout would have been 120,000 or 130,000. Instead, the Obama ground operation helped jack the turnout up to an astonishing 240,000.

The Obama victory ranks among the biggest political coups in decades. His team, led by campaign manager David Plouffe and field-ops specialist Paul Tewes, threw all the campaign’s local resources into a risky Iowa-or-bust strategy. It centered on an “unusual suspects” approach—galvanizing participation among the tens of thousands of fired-up-ready-to-go young voters who had been thought too flaky and distracted to caucus—driven by a novel, hugely successful reading of how Iowa really works.

“The usual theory is that you just work the previous caucus-goer lists,” Tewes recalled. “This originates from the myth that caucus participation is a regular thing. It isn’t. Competitive caucuses happen once every four, eight, even 12 years, so it’s not like a regular pattern for people. You have to start with the destruction of that myth. The crowds we were getting were just unbelievable, so we had to figure out a way to turn them into caucusgoers.”